Rapid heating or cooling of contents within containers, and more particularly cylindrical containers such as beverage cans or bottles, has plagued beverage consumers for years. Due to the rate of heat transfer dictated by container properties, the method of employing heat transfer, and because there is no compact refrigeration equipment at least in the sense of cooling, people often are having to deal with drinking beverages whose temperatures are inadequate to their liking.
In this regard, most people resort to submerging their beverages in a warmer or cooler medium to affect heat transfer toward the temperature of their preference, but most methods employed require a long time period to change the contents of container's temperature, and worse, an uneven heating or cooling within the affected container.
For instance, as it pertains to cooling, the most common method employed for cooling a container to a desired temperature, such as a beverage container, requires the use of a cooler filled with ice. A person will submerge their warm beverage container into such cooler full of ice and wait for said beverage can to cool. Depending upon preference this method may take anywhere between 30 minutes to 1 hour to reach the desired temperature. The experienced user of ice coolers, such as a tailgater, realizes that the speed of the cooling may be increased by the intermittent spinning of the can axially about the beverage containers longitudinal axis. However the achieved time savings employing this assisted method is minimal, since the rotation of the can in the ice is intermittent and at a low number of revolutions per minute.
Another method often employed for cooling a beverage is the exposure of the beverage containing container to cold air in a refrigerator or freezer. Again this method achieves to cool the outside of the container, leaving conductive heat transfer to do its slow work within the container. Thus to achieve the desired temperature often takes a long period of time. Moreover, often a user tends to forget placing the container being cooled in the freezer, and in the instance of most carbonated beverages, the container explode, leaving an undesirable mess for the user to clean.
In the sense of heating the contents within the container, one method often employed is the use of a microwave. The microwave, however, causes uneven heating within the container. As a result of this uneven heating, it is quite common to find scalding hot pockets of the heated material mixed amongst warmer and cold pockets of the contents. One example where this phenomenon is witnessed is baby formula, which has spawned the requirement of warnings on the formula containers warning consumers to refrain from microwaving the infant drink. Nonetheless, the microwave method is further limited due to certain containers not having the ability to be placed into the microwave, such as metallic containers, or containers which may easily melt.
Several methods have been employed to speed up or affect the process of heat transfer, the most successful being inducing convective heat transfer. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 4,580,405 provides such methods and devices for practicing same. One such drawback, therein, is that the device and method employed does not make portable use easy. Not only does the device require 120 volts of alternating current (VAC) power to rotate the motor, but it also requires the use of a small container for holding the cooling medium (ice, as taught). In addition, the claimed device employs the use of a suction cup to hold the top of the beverage container, thus it does not physically clip to the can, and the container often comes separated from the suction cup several times during the spinning/cooling process. Moreover the taught device and method cannot accommodate for several sized cans, nor a bottle top or mouth, and cannot be used for containers which already have been opened. Thus the device is limited to spinning the tops of closed beverage cans.
Other methods employed to provide similar solutions claim portability, but all require the use of a self contained container for holding ice, which also provide a counter-motive force to overcome the spinning torque of the motor. As a result the motor assembly of these devices, while it may be removable, cannot be used without the accompanying container for holding the cooling or heating medium, because if used without, the motor would simply spin in place without spinning the container to be cooled, or require a user to hold the motor assembly to provide the counter-motive force to the motor torque. In addition, other methods employed cannot interchangeably be used for spinning objects of varying sizes, such as baby bottles, the neck or mouth of glass or plastic bottles, 12 ounce cans, 12 ounce bottles, and 750 milliliter wine bottles with one single apparatus. Finally, some methods use purely gripping a can without positively engaging the container, the likes of which allow for containers to slip out of a container holder when held upright.
Thus there exists a need for a truly portable container spinning device, which does not require AC power while being used, that can be used with any size container, irrespective of whether the container is open. There additionally exists a need for a container spinning device which positively engages a container to allow the container to remain positively engaged when being held in the upright position. Furthermore there exists a need for a portable container spinning device which employs a method of holding any sized container that prevents the container slipping when exposed to a resistance during the heating or cooling process. Finally, there further exists a need for a portable device which provides a counter-motive force preventing the motor from spinning freely, thus allowing the spinning of container to affect heat transfer virtually anywhere and without additional devices or attachments. No such container spinning apparatus has been presented to date to address these issues, thus there remains an unmet need.